THE Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB) pledged here yesterday that it will support producers in agriculture, livestock and fisheries sectors to the hilt as it plays its part in implementing the national industrialization agenda and fighting widespread poverty.
The pledge was made by the Director of Finance and Investment, Mr Derick Lugemala, at the launch of the International Week for Providing Services to Clients at the bank’s headquarters and was attended by workers and prominent clients. The week is marked annually any day of the first week of October.
Mr Lugemela said the bank appreciates the importance and role of clients in promoting product value chains in all the three sectors, explaining that the bank correspondingly has a big role to empower their clients by giving them concessionary loans in order to bolster value chains in the three sectors.
“TADB does not simply work with our clients. We take our client as a project, in the sense that we know exactly the client’s business, where he buys raw materials and how he process those materials; the aim being to add value and increase productivity in the entire production process. With that kind of understanding we offer finance to applicants,” he explained.
Mr Lugemela said the duty of their bank is to uplift the producers by giving them soft loans.
The thrust of TADB effort, he said, is to implement government’s agenda so that Tanzania becomes an industrial nation by 2025.
By June this year, the bank had disbursed to the agriculture sector alone 429,000,868,790.58/-.
Out of this, for example, 246,488,453,466.38/- was disbursed in support of value chains, 15,127,722,059.21/- went to applicants to buy machineries and 141,495,930,116.19/- in support of those doing trade.
The Director of Tobi Peanut Butter, Ms Agatha Laizer, said the bank’s support has grown her company.
“We have been able to realize our dream because of regular soft loans we get from the TADB. Because without their loans we would have failed,” she said.
Mr Lengidu Abdallah, a livestock keeper, said TADB’s intervention has helped them secure animal feed and a better breed of animals.
“We shall never be distant from this bank,” he said
Until June this year, TADB had disbursed 12,087,494,904.20/- in support of dairy value chains.
